A Different Sort of Silence
by Sanded Silk
Summary: Oneshot, takes place after the war. Jeanne meditates on the war and the brief presence of Werner in her life. Title likely to be changed. Jeanne/Werner


**A/N**: So I'm back for a few weeks! I probably won't get much writing done, but I'm posting this, which I worked on as a sort of warm-up for whatever writing may happen while I'm free. I'm really sorry for my absence of late, and for all the unfinished stories on my profile. I will get to them, eventually, one by one. Doesn't that sound familiar.

For now, please enjoy and review this piece! This story is a spin-off of the movie "Le Silence de la mer," which is a French movie (on YouTube, in parts) set in German-occupied France in 1941. It's incredibly poignant, achingly beautiful. Just go watch it.

-Sanded Silk-

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_You pace your side of the river of stars, your feet hitting the black void, and the only thing you know for sure is that he is there, on the other side of the motionless current of starlight. You can see him, across the immeasurable space, the endless thread of time—he is matching your steps, turning as you turn and pacing as you pace, looking directly at you across the distance with that implacable smile._

She opened her eyes with a start, and found herself staring, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, at the ceiling of her parents' bedroom. With a sigh, she sat up, rubbing the dregs of sleep from her eyes. She had been dreaming, but could not remember what the dream had been about—she only knew that _he_ had been in it, his pensive silences and earnest one-sided conversation commanding the course of her dream. Though she could not remember his exact words or their exact situation, she knew from countless other dreams involving him that, even in these fitful images, conjured up by the darkest corners of her mind, she maintained her silent front to his amiable chatter—not out of spite or habit, but because she, even with her clever tongue, could not conjure up worthy responses to his casual thoughts, which fell in harmless, discrete clinks like change from an upturned wallet, yet weighed heavily upon her mind.

Since he had left, she had lost her grandfather to the stresses of the war. Her grandfather was now tucked neatly into the sand-strewn dirt, beside her parents. But _he_—where was _he_?

Awake now, she set her feet on the floor, not quite ready to stand up yet. As she looked about the room, her eyes glossing over the undisturbed furniture and the morning sun filtering through the embroidery of the partially-drawn curtains, she could see his tall, broad-shouldered silhouette, hear his muted footfalls as he moved about the room. It suddenly occurred to her that she could no longer remember what he smelled like. She remembered being unable to liken his scent to anything else when she held his scarf up to her nose, years ago, in the dead of night on a Christmas day, when she had the house to herself. The scent had been uniquely him, pleasant but alien.

The war was over now. The global death toll, not established but certainly something of an ungodly magnitude, brought the far-sighted to their knees, left the foolish blissfully deluded, and impressed upon the not-foolish-but-not-quite-wise a vague sense of terror, as if a monster, unseen and unheard but somehow felt, had passed them in a pitch-black wood. No one, however, could deny that the balance of the world had been violently uprooted. The world badly needed to be put back together, but no one had any inkling of how such a task should be carried out, or what shapes the pieces of the world were in, or even what a mended world should look like.

She felt the terror, the vast helplessness, the mind-numbing heartache, the guilty revulsion at the idea of looking the immense, monstrous evil straight in its startlingly-human eyes. She could see it in the faces of friends as they talked of the weather, and in the eyes of strangers as they hurried by her on the road—the dread of realizing the true magnitude of what had happened, and the childish, impossible, yet persistent hope that all of this had been one gruesome joke played on them by their own minds.

She had been taught by her parents to acknowledge each person as their own person, to hold her own biases at bay. But her parents passed, the war began, the Germans occupied her town, and she buried those teachings deep because hating each German soldier without a second thought was easier. Now, she was unearthing their teachings, wondering if they applied even to the ghastly deeds committed by countless soldiers and the equally ghastly ideas that some people somehow convinced themselves to embrace, and hoping desperately that they did apply, for _his _sake. Although he was a German captain, she had not been able to detect a single strand of evil in all the fibers of his being; she had seen the pain and confusion in his face when he finally realized the purpose of the war; and she could not imagine him standing beside Hitler in the God-forsaken flames of Hell.

It was too soon after the war, she reasoned—she could not expect herself to sort out her moral compass while the soil of the world was still steaming with blood. But the questions gnawed at her—could she possibly forgive, even come to care for (because she couldn't use the word "love", not yet, it had to be some sort of abomination to love a German soldier—right? Right?), a soldier who had unknowingly defended the atrocities that his government carried out? Should he be forgiven his disillusionment, his cluelessness, about what had really been going on?

She squirreled away these thoughts as irrelevant to her immediate life, focusing on raising Pierre, on music. But no matter how furiously she applied herself to the demands of daily life, her raging subconscious spilled over its confines into every mundane thought, every iron-hard facet of reality. She saw _him_ crouching by fireplaces, striding across streets, standing thoughtfully at the end of the fishing dock or by a piano as someone played it, looking at her through the windows of passing cars. Haunted by the memory of a man whom she fell in love with moments too late, she marched through life with a clipped pace and a passive expression, and spent sleepless hours in the night wondering how she did it.

_Which of you is on the wrong side of the river? But, more importantly, can either of you find the way across?_

"Be sure to finish your lunch, Pierre."

"I know."

"And be sure to come right back home! Or are you planning to go somewhere later today?"

"No, I'll be home on time."

"All right." She dwelled fleetingly on how he now had to bend his neck to receive her kiss. "Be safe."

"I kno-ow. See you later!"

All elbows and lanky legs, he made his way down the path in classic adolescent fashion. How would Pierre feel, she wondered as she closed the door, if he knew of her thoughts? She thought briefly, guiltily, of his parents Marie and Louis, their unfailing devotion toward their beloved little Pierre, their smiling faces like two suns. Nothing had been heard of them since the day they were carted away, screaming and struggling, before Pierre's too-young eyes, and she grew less and less confident of their survival with each passing day. She was certain that Pierre had resigned himself to the notion that he would never see his parents again.

_He is lifting an arm, pointing at you. No—pointing behind you. For the first time, you look away from him, in the opposite direction, and you see an endless stretch of stars. You were never on a shore. You were pacing on the motionless current of an ocean of starlight, and you were drowning in its silent, cold depths without even knowing it. You look back at him—did he know, all this time?_

After giving her scheduled music lessons, she went about her daily errands, lingering by the fish dock after collecting her basket of fish. She remembered how he stood on the end of the land end of the dock, his leather-booted feet pointing out to the sea, his eyes fixed on her—and the way he had bent down, pulling off a glove, to help her collect the fish after she knocked the basket over in her hurry to escape her own discomfort. She knelt, now, at the end of the dock, as she had knelt then to pick up the fish, and she remembered the way his hand lingered in the grass, the confusion and vulnerability and entreaty in his gaze.

_But what does it mean, to drown in a motionless ocean, to fall through stars? You want to scream at him, to rail and rant and cry. Why did he use your precious little time together to soliloquize about something as ludicrous as the day's weather? Why didn't he speak when his face was burning with unrelieved torment and confusion? Why did he leave for the Russian front when he saw the plea in your face, clear as day—when he realized the true purpose of this war—when he openly admitted to being utterly lost?_

As Pierre completed his homework by the fireplace, she opened the piano and began playing Bach's prelude in C minor, as she did every night. The C major brought too much pain, and it never sounded quite as perfect as when he had played it for her that Christmas night. And so she stretched her fingers over the keys, listening as the C minor issued forth.

She looked up as she played and watched as he appeared from the depths of her memory, stepping slowly through the doorway. She watched as he stopped by the piano, his hand resting on its wooden frame. She watched as the disbelief and captivation in his face was slowly eclipsed by an intense, shameless, almost erotic pleasure. How clearly her mind recreated him—how perfectly she could still recollect the angularities of his face.

She played with the same urgency as she had when she first played it for him, slurring over the staccatos and driving the tempo to something fevered, rushing to stop him, to distract him, to anchor him to the living world. She imagined, vaguely, that with every time she played it, she was saving his life again, in some other way, from some other danger.

_He watches you as the carpet of your disillusionment is whipped out from underneath you, as you thrash about in the eons of empty space between the stars. He paces now along the shore in a straight line, keeping his feet close to the edge of the ocean, his eyes never leaving you. And you know that he means for you to follow._

Pierre looked up with a start and frowned. At the same moment, she realized that her image of him was missing an arm. The left sleeve of his greatcoat hung limp and flat from the shoulder seam, like a curtain.

_He stops, his feet pointing out to the ocean. As you claw your way along, parallel to the shore, you see it. You see the dock. You drag yourself onto the end of the dock, ignoring the splinters it gives you as it protests your use of it, and force yourself to stand. You watch the way his greatcoated frame fills the width of the other end of the dock as he waits for you, the way his smile deepens—_

Other details suddenly flooded her consciousness—his hat was a civilian one, his greatcoat devoid of military markings, his face webbed sparsely with shallow, hairline wrinkles, his bearing an ocean graver. She stood quickly, knocking over her piano stool in her rush. Pierre stood as well, dropping his pencil, asking her if she knew this man. She wanted to answer him, and she worked her jaw, opening and closing her mouth, but she could not produce a sound, not even a whimper. She watched helplessly as he slowly removed his hat and nodded with unfailing politeness.

"Good evening," he said, and _that was his voice, those were his eyes, that was the implacable curve of his lips, that was him standing there, leaning against her piano—_

_—and here you are, out of breath and standing on the wrong end of the dock, an abyss of stars waiting to consume you. So what are you waiting for?_

She tripped over a leg of her piano bench and recovered immediately—

_You hurtle toward him—_

—and stopped inches from his body. She didn't dare touch him, for fear that her mind was playing an inordinately elaborate trick on her, and that her hand would pass through him if she reached out to try to touch him—and she simply couldn't bear that.

_—and he takes a step out onto the dock, before breaking into a run as well. As he nears you, you can feel the heat of the living emanating from him._

"I apologize that I cannot hold you properly," he said, his voice faltering, as he gazed down at her face. His hand reached up, and she felt his bony fingertips ghost over her lips, the wetness of her cheeks. "After you saved me from being blown up in my car," he continued, "I promptly went and got myself nearly killed in the Russian front. They had to amputate my arm, inches below my shoulder." The tone of his voice was curiously light, as if the loss of his arm had occurred only in a bad dream. Having nothing else to do, she wrapped her arms around his spare frame and hid her tears in the snowflake-stained collar of his coat.

_Droplets are falling from your eyes, blurring your vision, and as the infinite distance suddenly becomes zero, as your bodies click together like adjacent pieces in a puzzle, the dock becomes slick with water. The floodgates open, the stars become a wash of water and light, and the ocean comes to life._

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**A/N**: Hope you enjoyed it! Please review! Good grief, I need to sleep.

-Sanded Silk-


End file.
